Once more with feeling

I wonder if you are afraid of public speaking? Most people are. And for this reason, people who have to speak publicly prepare what they have to say very carefully – because the thought of standing in front of a group and not knowing what to say, or losing their train of thought terrifies them. And that’s usually why they are bad at it: the one thing they really need to do – to share how they feel about their topic – is the last thing that crosses their mind.

I started my career as a college lecturer, and like the countless extraordinary people who work in teaching roles, stood in front of groups of people - sometimes for several hours a day – not knowing what I was going to say. I would invite you to imagine what that is like if you haven’t experienced it at first hand: ushered into a room, rows of expectant faces, knowing only that it is your role to be their teacher for the next 80 minutes and that there is a curriculum to follow.

What do you do? As a young teacher it didn’t take me long to realise that teaching calls for much more than summarising and explaining the textbook - that this would be akin to an actor reading their lines from a script, pausing only to take questions from the audience, rather than playing their role. You know in your gut that you are on the spot, that something extraordinary is required. If you are a good teacher you will find yourself doing this extraordinary thing - and it has taken me around twenty years to figure out precisely what this is. And though there are many people who can surely do it better than I ever could, I don’t know anyone else who can explain it.

In the beginning, I thought I would find the answer in the research – in the accumulated wisdom of psychologists and cognitive scientists. I can save you the trouble – it’s not there. I left teaching after five years attempting to apply learning theory to classrooms for the chance to apply learning theory to organisations, and to earn more money. The advantage of this kind of ‘in vivo’ experimentation is that whilst it usually lacks the rigor of the laboratory, it at least has a chance to get at the truth because it looks at learning under normal conditions, without stripping away those things that – it turns out – give it its essential character. Such as ‘care’ for example.

But there were occasions when I had the chance to test theories more rigorously - and the results would usually surprise me: back in the 90s ‘learning styles’ was a watchword for hip educationalists. I was with them – talking about something I called the ‘Hear-See-Do’ model based on Honey & Mumford & Bruner’s modes of representation. Turns out it was bunkum. We took the same information and rendered it into a range of formats – from text, through audio and images all the way to flash interaction and variations in between, then tested recall after 30 mins. Your prediction?

And the result? Text won. Students remembered slightly more from the plain text (though they found the richer formats more entertaining).

Why?

It shouldn’t surprise us really: most of us will have done plenty of learning from textbooks. Few of us struggle with a textual answer to some medical condition we have googled. Wikipedia is mostly text. It turns out that learners are flexible, and that whilst there may well be slight variations in preferences this doesn’t matter in the real world – what matters is whether we want to learn. Teachers know this intuitively, but learning theory completely missed the point.

This is your cue to think ‘motivation matters’. Nope. Motivation is important, but it’s just a side-effect of the mechanism used by humans to learn. If you witness a fight on your journey home (as I did once on the BBC bus, watching a pinstriped banker brawl with a tramp, shoving him into the street) then this will stay with you for a long time. What was my motivation?

And I take the point that this is memory not learning, but learning is merely the name we give to a cultural practice in which we memorise with a view to doing something with it at a future date. It’s a semantic distinction, in other words. If I hear a catchy tune, but don’t sing it until a year later did I learn it or not? (Though it's fair comment to point out that here I am talking about episodic and semantic memory rather than procedural (muscle) memory).

So how does learning work? It turns out that we don't yet have a name for the mechanism; I have called it 'affective context' other people have called it gut instinct or 'the primitive brain' or something like that. The problem all along has been that we looked at learning through a Cartesian lens - from a rational perspective. From that angle it looked something like a computational process - like information transfer, or data storage and retrieval. But rather like archaeologists unearthing a buried city, neuroscientists have uncovered the tip of a vast system that lies beneath the superficialities of the cortex - and it looks very different. It has an operating system all of its own.

An example: the discovery of the 'mirror neuron' system means that in laymans' terms you and I are connected emotionally (unless you are a psychopath) to the people you see around you. Our systems literally mirror the feelings of others by reading their expressions and behaviours and duplicating their emotional state. When people cry we may also cry - certainly it makes us feel sad. Laughter is contagious. But consider for a minute what this means for teaching: the enthusiasm of a teacher - for their subject, for their students - is literally transferred to their students. Let me guess which teachers you remember from school: the enthusiastic ones, the ones who cared, the exciting and excitable ones (and the horrible ones - predictably). And, as Maya Angelou once pointed out, you are more likely to remember how they made you feel than what they had to say.

This simple but fundamental aspect of teaching comes as a surprise to some teachers, but I suspect is unsurprising to others: there are teachers who labour under the illusion that students require the expertise or knowledge locked away in their academic skulls. Not so. In an age where information was hard to come by this misinterpretation was easier to understand: what students really require is their teachers' enthusiasm, their zeal, their care for their subject-matter and for those that they teach. This and only this is genuinely transferred: the learning is something students do - if they too care. Today, most students learn because of exams – something they are drilled to care about.

The 'mechanics of care' are vastly more complex than we imagine. As Nietzsche once pointed out 'thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier and simpler.' Mirror neurons are just one small part of an integrated system designed to process information in this seemingly alien fashion: we codify our experiences according to their affective context, and use this affective metadata to make decisions and to process comparisons - whether we are playing chess or throwing footballs (as Jonah Lehrer points out), the basic mechanism is the same. When Wordsworth pens 'I wandered lonely as a cloud' it is loneliness that allows him to bridge the semantic divide. This has little if anything to do with emotional intelligence.

When I ask people about learning their responses do not follow the pattern predicted by any of the classical learning theories. They remember the highs and lows. Learning - real learning - is usually expressed in overtly emotional terms. People tell stories. They say 'I remember this one time when...' and a story is simply information wrapped in affective metadata. In Bartlett's classic 'War of the ghosts' experiment, the finding was that the emotive feature of the tale remained whilst all else slipped away in the retelling. Human cognition is all about codifying experiences in affective terms, then using those features to make comparisons and establish schema. If I think about the train journey I used to make, I remember standing on the platform in the early morning darkness as the cold rain soaked huddled commuters. This was a low point, now it is all that remains of those countless experiences. As Milan Kundera points out, we do not remember everything - just a handful of snapshots. All of them emotionally charged.

Good teachers are enthusiastic, good teachers care about their students, good teachers tell stories and use examples, good teachers challenge students, good teachers relate learning to the lives of their students. We all know this. But all these features are predicted by affective context theory, whilst no other approach begins to explain them.

A sound approach to instructional design begins by codifying care: by mapping out those thing that concern the learner and those that do not, so that resources can be provided where the degree of concern is high, and impactful experiences constructed where it is low: flight simulators and reference manuals.

Learning. It turns out this is something I care about.